net.wars

Review: Careless People

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
By Sarah-Wynn-Williams
Macmillan
ISBN: 978-1035065929

In his 2021 book Social Warming, Charles Arthur concludes his study of social media with the observation that the many harms he documented happened because no one cared to stop them. “Nobody meant for this to happen,” he writes to open his final chapter.

In her new book, Careless People, about her time at Facebook, former New Zealand diplomat Sarah Wynn-Williams shows the truth of Arthur’s take. A sad tale of girl-meets-company, girl-loses-company, girl-tells-her-story, it starts with Wynn-Williams stalking Facebook to identify the right person to pitch hiring her to build its international diplomatic relationships. I kept hoping increasing dissent and disillusion would lead her to quit. Instead, she stays until she’s fired after HR dismisses her complaint of sexual harassment.

In 2011, when Wynn-Williams landed her dream job, Facebook’s wild expansion was at an early stage. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is awkward, sweaty, and uncomfortable around world leaders, who are dismissive. By her departure in 2017, presidents of major countries want selfies with him and he’s much more comfortable – but no longer cares. Meanwhile, then-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, wealthy from her time at Google, becomes a celebrity via her book, Lean In, written with the former TV comedy writer Nell Scovell. Sandberg’s public feminism clashes with her employee’s experience. When Wynn-Williams’s first child is a year old, a fellow female employee congratulates her on keeping the child so well-hidden she didn’t know it existed.

The book provides hysterically surreal examples of American corporatism. She is in the delivery room, feet in stirrups, ordered to push, when a text arrives: can she draft talking points for Davos? (She tries!) For an Asian trip, Zuckerberg wants her to arrange a riot or peace rally so he can appear to be “gently mobbed”. When the company fears “Mark” or “Sheryl” might be arrested if they travel to Korea, managers try to identify a “body” who can be sent in as a canary. Wynn-Williams’s husband has to stop her from going. Elsewhere, she uses her diplomatic training to land Zuckerberg a “longer-than-normal handshake” with Xi Jinping.

So when you get to her failure to get her bosses to beef up the two-person content moderation team for Myanmar’s 60 million people, rewrite the section so Burmese characters render correctly, and post country-specific policies, it’s obvious what her bosses will decide. The same is true of internal meetings discussing the tools later revealed to let advertisers target depressed teens. Wynn-Williams hopes for a safe way forward, but warns that company executives’ “lethal carelessness” hasn’t changed.

Cultural clash permeates this book. As a New Zealander, she’s acutely conscious of the attitudes she encounters, and especially of the wealth and class disparity that divide the early employees from later hires. As pregnancies bring serious medical problems and a second child, the very American problem of affording health insurance makes offending her bosses ever riskier.

The most important chapters, whose in-the-room tales fill in gaps in books by Frances Haugen, Sheera Frankel and Cecilia Kang, and Steven Levy, are those in which Wynn-Williams recounts the company’s decision to embrace politics and build its business in China. If, her bosses reason, politicians become dependent on Facebook for electoral success, they will balk at regulating it. Donald Trump’s 2016 election, which Zuckerberg initially denied had been significantly aided by Facebook, awakened these political aspirations. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg leads the company to build a censorship machine to please China. Wynn-Williams abhors all this – and refuses to work on China. Nonetheless, she holds onto the hope that she can change the company from inside.

Apparently having learned little from Internet history, Meta has turned this book into a bestseller by trying to suppress it. Wynn-Williams managed one interview, with Business Insider, before an arbitrator’s injunction stopped her from promoting the book or making any “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” related to Meta. This fits the man Wynn-Williams depicts who hates to lose so much that his employees let him win at board games.

The risks of recklessness

In 1997, when the Internet was young and many fields were still an unbroken green, the United States Institute of Peace convened a conference on virtual diplomacy. In my writeup for the Telegraph, I saw that organizer Bob Schmitt had convened two communities – computer and diplomacy – who were both wondering how they could get the other to collaborate but had no common ground.

On balance, the computer folks, who saw a potential market as well as a chance to do some good, were probably more eager than the diplomats, who favored caution and understood that in their discipline speed was often a bad idea. They were also less attracted than one might think to the notion of virtual meetings despite the travel it would save. Sometimes, one told me, it’s the random conversations around the water cooler that make plain what’s really happening. Why is Brazil mad? In a virtual meeting, it may be harder to find out that it’s not the negotiations but the fact that their soccer team lost last night.

I thought at the time that the conference would be the first of many to tackle these issues. But as it’s turned out, I’ve never been at an event anything like it…until now, nearly 30 years later. This week, a group of diplomats and human rights advocates met, similarly, to consider how the cyber world is changing diplomacy and international relations.

The timing is unexpectedly fortuitous. This week’s revelation that someone added Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat in which US cabinet officials discussed plans for an imminent military operation in Yemen shows the kinds of problems you get when you rely too much on computer mediation. In the usual setting, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), you can see exactly who’s there, and communications to anyone outside that room are entirely blocked. As a security clearance-carrying friend of mine said, if he’d made such a blunder he’d be in prison.

The Signal blunder was raised by almost every speaker. It highlights something diplomats think about a lot: who is or is not in the room. Today, as in 1997, behavioral cues are important; one diplomat estimated that meeting virtually costs you 50% to 60% of the communication you have when meeting face-to-face. There are benefits, too, of course, such as opening side channels to remote others who can advise on specific questions, or the ability to assemble a virtual team a small country could never afford to send in person.

These concerns have not changed since 1997. But it’s clear that today’s diplomats feel they have less choice about what new technology gets deployed and how than they did then, when the Internet’s most significant predecessor new technology was the global omnipresence of news network CNN, founded in 1980. Now, much of what control they had then is disappearing, both because human behavior overrides their careful, rulebound, friction-filled diplomatic channels and processes via shadow IT, but also because the biggest technology companies own so much of what we call “public” infrastructure.

Another key difference: many people don’t see the need for education to learn facts; it’s a particular problem for diplomats, who rely on historical data to show the world they aspire to build. And another: today a vastly wider array of actors, from private companies to individuals and groups of individuals, can create world events. And finally: in 1997 multinational companies were already challenging the hegemony of governments, but they were not yet richer and more powerful than countries.

Cue for a horror thought: what if Big Tech, which is increasingly interested in military markets, and whose products are increasingly embedded at the hearts of governments decide that peace is bad for business? Already they are allying with politicians to resist human rights principles, most notably privacy.

Which cues another 1997 memory: Nicholas Negroponte absurdly saying that the Internet would bring world peace by breaking down national borders. In 20 years, he said (that would be eight years ago) children would not know what nationalism is. Instead, on top of all today’s wars and internal conflicts, we’re getting virtual infrastructure attacks more powerful than bullets, and proactive agents fueled by large language models. And all fueled by the performative-outrage style of social media, which is becoming just how people speak, publicly and privately.

All this is more salient when you listen to diplomats and human rights activists as they are the ones who see up close the human lives lost. Meta’s name comes up most often, as in Myanmar and Ethiopia.

The mood was especially touchy because a couple of weeks ago a New Zealand diplomat was recalled after questioning US president Donald Trump’s understanding of history during a public panel in London – ironically in Chatham House under the Chatham House rule.

“You say the wrong thing on the wrong platform at the wrong time, and your career is gone,” one observed. Their people perimeter is gone, as it has been for so many of us for a decade or more. But more than most people, diplomats who don’t have trust have nothing. And so: “We’re in a time when a single message can up-end relationships.”

No surprise, then, that the last words reflected 1997’s conclusion: “Diplomacy is still a contact sport.”

Illustrations: Internet meme rewriting Wikipedia’s Alice and Bob page explaining man-in-the-middle attacks with the names Hegseth, Waltz, and Goldberg, referencing the Signal snafu.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Dorothy Parker was wrong

Goldie Hawn squinted into the lights. “I can’t read that,” she said to her co-presenter. “Cataracts.”

It was the 2025 Academy Awards. She was wearing a pale gold gown, and her hair and makeup did their best to evoke the look she’s had ever since she became a star in the 1960s. She is, in fact, 79. But Hollywood 79. Except for the cataracts. I know people who cheered when she said that bit of honesty about her own aging.

Doubtless soon Hawn will join the probably hundreds of millions who’ve had cataract surgery, and at her next awards outing she’ll be able to read the Teleprompter just fine. Because, let’s face it, although the idea of the surgery is scary and although the tabloids painted Hawn’s “condition” as “tragic”, if you’re going to have something wrong with you at 79, cataracts are the least worst. They’re not life-threatening. There’s a good, thoroughly tested treatment that takes less than half an hour. Recovery is short (a few weeks). Side effects, immediate or ongoing, are rare and generally correctable. Treatment vastly improves your quality of life and keeps you independent. Even delaying treatment is largely benign: the cataract may harden and become more complicated to remove, but doesn’t do permanent damage.

Just don’t see the 1929 short experimental film Un Chien Andalou when you’re 18. That famous opening scene with the razor and the eyeball squicks out *everybody*. Thank you, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.

I have cataracts. But: I also have a superpower. Like lots of people with extreme myopia, even at 71 I can read the smallest paragraph on the Jaeger eye test in medium-low lighting conditions. I have to hold it four and a half inches from my face, but close-up has always been the only truly reliable part of my vision.

Eye doctors have a clear, shared understanding of what constitutes normal vision, which involves not needing glasses to see at a distance and needing reading glasses around the time you turn 40. So when it comes time for cataract surgery they see it as an opportunity to give you the vision that normal people have.

In the entertainment world, this attitude was neatly summed up in 1926 by the famed acerbic wisecrack and New Yorker writer Dorothy Parker: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” It’s nonsense. Women who wear glasses know it’s nonsense. There was even a movie – How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) – which tackled this silliness by having Marilyn Monroe’s Pola wander around bumping into walls and getting onto wrong planes until she meets Freddie (David Wayne), who tells her to put her glasses on and that he thinks she looks better wearing them. Of course she does. Restoring the ability to see in focus removes the blank cluelessness from her face.

“They should put on your tombstone ‘She loved myopia’,” joked the technician drawing up a specification for the lens they were going to implant. We all laughed. But it’s incorrect, since what I love is not myopia but the intimate feeling of knowing I can read absolutely anything in most lighting conditions.

But kudos: whatever their preferences, they are doing their best to accommodate mine – all credit to the NHS and Moorfields. The first eye has healed quickly, and while the full outcome is still uncertain (it’s too soon) the results look promising.

So, some pointers, culled by asking widely what people wished they’d known beforehand or asked their surgeon.

– Get a diving mask or swimming goggles to wear in the shower because for the first couple of weeks they don’t want all that water (or soap) to get in your eye. (This was the best tip I got, from my local postmaster.)

– A microwaveable heated mask, which I didn’t try, might help if you’re in discomfort (but ask your doctor).

– Plan to feel frustrated for the first week because your body feels fine but you aren’t supposed to do anything strenuous that might raise the pressure in your eye and disrupt its healing. Don’t do sports, don’t lift weights, don’t power walk, don’t bend over with your eyes below your waist, and avoid cooking or anything else that might irritate your eyes and tempt you to scratch or apply pressure. The bright side: you can squat to reach things. And you can walk gently.

– When you ask people what they wish they’d known, many will say “How easy it was” and “I wish I’d done it years earlier”. In your panicked pre-surgery state, this is not helpful. It is true that the operation didn’t hurt (surgeons are attentive to this, because they don’t want you to twitch). It is true that the lights shining on your eye block sight of what they’re doing. I saw a lot of magenta and blue lights. I heard machine sounds, which my surgeon kindly explained as part of fulfilling my request to talk me through it. Some liquid dripped into my hair.

– Take the time you need to prepare, because there’s no undo button.

Think of it as a very scary dental appointment.

Illustrations: Pola (Marilyn Monroe) finding out that glasses can be an asset in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953).

Lost futures

In early December, the Biden administration’s Department of Justice filed its desired remedies, having won its case that Google is a monopoly. Many foresaw a repeat of 2001, when the incoming Bush administration dropped the Clinton DoJ’s plan to break up Microsoft.

Maybe not this time. In its first filing, Trump’s DoJ still wants Google to divest itself of the Chrome browser and intends to bar it from releasing other browsers. The DoJ also wants to impose some restrictions on Android and Google’s AI investments.

At The Register, Thomas Claburn reports that Mozilla is objecting to the DoJ’s desire to bar Google from paying other companies to promote its search engine by default. Those payments, Mozilla president Mark Surman admits to Claburn, keep small independent browsers afloat.

Despite Mozilla’s market shrinkage and current user complaints, it and its fellow minority browsers remain important in keeping the web open and out of full corporate control. It’s definitely counter-productive if the court, in trying to rein in Google’s monopoly, takes away what viability these small players have left. They are us.

***

On the other hand, it’s certainly not healthy for those small independents to depend for their survival on the good will of companies like Google. The Trump administration’s defunding of – among so many things – scientific research is showing just how dangerous it can be.

Within the US itself, the government has announced cuts to indirect funding, which researchers tell me are crippling to universities; $800 million cut in grants to Johns Hopkins, $400 at Columbia University, and so many more.

But it doesn’t stop in the US or with the cuts to USAID, which have disrupted many types of projects around the world, some of them scientific or medical research. The Trump administration is using its threats to scientific funding across the world to control speech and impose its, um, values. This morning, numerous news sources report that Australian university researchers have been sent questionnaires they must fill out to justify their US-funded grants. Among the questions: their links to China and their compliance with Trump’s gender agenda.

To be fair, using grants and foreign aid to control speech is not a new thing for US administrations. For example, Republican presidents going back to Reagan have denied funding to international groups that advocated abortion rights or provided abortions, limiting what clinicians could say to pregnant patients. (I don’t know if there are Democratic comparables.)

Science is always political to some extent: think the for stating that the earth was not the center of the universe. Or take intelligence: in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould documented a century or more of research by white, male scientists finding that white, male scientists were the smartest things on the planet. Or say it inBig Tobacco and Big Oil, which spent decades covering up research showing that their products were poisoning us and our planet.

The Trump administration’s effort is, however, a vastly expanded attempt that appears to want to squash anything that disagrees with policy, and it shows the dangers of allowing any one nation to amass too much “soft power”. The consequences can come quickly and stay long. It reminds me of what happened in the UK in the immediate post-EU referendum period, when Britain-based researchers found themselves being dropped from cross-EU projects because they were “too risky”, and many left for jobs in other countries where they could do their work in peace.

The writer Prashant Vaze sometimes imagines a future in which India has become the world’s leading scientific and technical superpower. This imagined future seems more credible by the day.

***

It’s strange to read that the 35-year-old domestic robots pioneer, iRobot, may be dead in a year. It seemed like a sure thing; early robotics researchers say that people were begging for robot vacuum cleaners even in the 1960s, perhaps inspired by Rosie, The Jetsons‘ robot maid.

Many people may have forgotten (or not known) the excitement that attended the first Roombas in 2002. Owners gave them names, took them on vacation, and posted videos. It looked like the start of a huge wave.

I bought a Roomba in 2003, reviewing it so enthusiastically that an email complained that I should have said I had been given it by a PR person. For a few happy months it wandered around cleaning.

Then one day it stopped moving and I discovered that long hair paralyzed it. I gave it away and went back to living with moths.

The Roomba now has many competitors, some highly sophisticated, run by apps, and able to map rooms, identify untouched areas, scrub stains, and clean in corners. Even so, domestic robots have not proliferated as imagined 20 – or 12 – years ago. I visit people’s houses, and while I sometimes encounter Alexas or Google Assistants, robot vacuums seem rare.

So much else of smart homes as imagined by companies like Microsoft and IBM remain dormant. It does seem like – perhaps a reflection on my social circle – the “smart home” is just a series of remote-control apps and outsourced services. Meh.

Illustrations: Rosie, the Jetsons‘ XB-500 robot maid, circa 1962.

Unsafe

The riskiest system is the one you *think* you can trust. Say it in encryption: the least secure encryption is encryption that has unknown flaws. Because, in the belief that your communication or data is protected, you feel it’s safe to indulge in what in other contexts would be obviously risky behavior. Think of it like an unseen hole in a condom.

This has always been the most dangerous aspect of the UK government’s insistence that its technical capability notices remain secret. Whoever alerted the Washington Post to the notice Apple received a month ago commanding it to weaken its Advanced Data Protection performed an important public service. Now, Carly Page reports at TechCrunch based on a blog posting by security expert Alec Muffett, the UK government is recognizing that principle by quietly removing from its web pages advice to use that same encryption that was directed at people whose communications are at high risk – such as barristers and other legal professionals. Apple has since withdrawn ADP in the UK.

More important long-term, at the Financial Times, Tim Bradshaw and Lucy Fisher report that Apple has appealed the government’s order to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. This will be, as the FT notes, the first time government powers under the Investigatory Powers Act (2016) to compel the weakening of security features will be tested in court. A ruling that the order was unlawful could be an important milestone in the seemingly interminable fight over encryption.

***

I’ve long had the habit of doing minor corrections on Wikipedia – fixing typos, improving syntax – as I find them in the ordinary course of research. But recently I have had occasion to create a couple of new pages, with the gratefully-received assistance of a highly experienced Wikipedian. At one time, I’m sure this was a matter of typing a little text, garlanding it with a few bits of code, and garnishing it with the odd reference, but standards have been rising all along, and now if you want your newly-created page to stay up it needs a cited reference for every statement of fact and a minimum of one per sentence. My modest pages had ten to 20 references, some servicing multiple items. Embedding the page matters, too, so you need to link mentions to all those pages. Even then, some review editor may come along and delete the page if they think the subject is not notable enough or violates someone’s copyright. You can appeal, of course…and fix whatever they’ve said the problem is.

It should be easier!

All of this detailed work is done by volunteers, who discuss the decisions they make in full view on the talk page associated with every content page. Studying the more detailed talk pages is a great way to understand how the encyclopedia, and knowledge in general, is curated.

Granted, Wikipedia is not perfect. Its policy on primary sources can be frustrating, and errors in cited secondary sources can be difficult to correct. The culture can be hostile if you misstep. Its coverage is uneven, But, as Margaret Talbot reports at the New Yorker and Amy Bruckman writes in her 2022 book, Should You Believe Wikipedia?, all those issues are fully documented.

Early on, Wikipedia was often the butt of complaints from people angry that this free encyclopedia made by *amateurs* threatened the sustainability of Encyclopaedia Britannica (which has survived though much changed). Today, it’s under attack by Elon Musk and the Heritage Foundation, as Lila Shroff writes at The Atlantic. The biggest danger isn’t to Wikipedia’s funding; there’s no offer anyone can make that would lead to a sale. The bigger vulnerability is the safety of individual editors. Scold they may, but as a collective they do important work to ensure that facts continue to matter.

***

Firefox users are manifesting more and more unhappiness about the direction Mozilla is taking with Firefox. The open source browser’s historic importance is outsized compared to its worldwide market share, which as of February 2025 is 2.63%, according to Statcounter. A long tail of other browsers are based on it, such as LibreWolf, Waterfox, and the privacy-protecting Tor.

The latest complaint, as Liam Proven and Thomas Claburn write at The Register is that Mozilla has removed its commitment not to sell user data from Firefox’s terms and conditions and privacy policy. Mozilla responded that the company doesn’t sell user data “in the way that most people think about ‘selling data'” but needed to change the language because of jurisdictional variations in what the word “sell” means. Still, the promise is gone.

This follows Mozilla’s September 2024 decision, reported by Richard Speed at The Register, to turn on by default a “privacy-preserving feature” to track users that led the NGO noyb to file a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority. And a month ago, Mark Hachman reported at PC World that Mozilla is building access to third-party generative AI chatbots into Firefox, and there are reports that it’s adding “AI-powered tab grouping.

All of these are basically unwelcome, and of all organizations Mozilla should have been able to foresee that. Go away, AI.

***

Molly White is expertly covering the Trump administration’s proposed “US Crypto Reserve”. Remains only to add Rachel Maddow, who compared it to having a strategic reserve of Beanie Babies.

Illustrations:: Beanie baby pelican.